Some free advice for Cory Booker as he prepares to take his seat in the U.S. Senate: Be as humble as Hillary.

When Clinton was elected to the Senate in 2000, she was smart enough to know that the massive egos in that building would feel threatened by her celebrity. So she kept a low profile, fetching coffee for other senators, allowing them to speak first at media events, even using a side entrance to her Senate office building to keep a low profile.

“I wanted to be a workhorse, not a show horse,” Clinton said.

It is hard to imagine Booker playing that role. He made fame as a city councilman when he camped in a trailer at a drug corner in Newark to draw attention to the problem. He lived in a condemned tower with no hot water for years to block its demolition. His loving devotion for his 1.4 million Twitter followers is legendary. Low key is not this man’s game.

Rutgers political science professor Ross Baker has been studying the Senate for decades, and has seen members sink and swim. Here are a few tips from him:

• Hire a good staff with deep Washington experience. It is tempting to hire people from the campaign staff back home, and Baker has seen it cause disasters over and over, especially for someone new to Washington.

• Take care of your reputation. “To be effective, you need to earn the trust of your colleagues,” Baker says. “You need to be someone to stick to your word if you give a commitment, even if it hurts.”

• Make a deal with the senior senator, Robert Menendez, regarding fundraising. Same-state senators compete to tap the same donor base, so it’s important to show restraint when the other guy is up for re-election.

• Don’t step on the egos. The late Sen. Frank Lautenberg, who was a CEO before entering politics, blew that one at first. “His colleagues didn’t appreciate taking orders,” Baker says. “But he realized that, and he hired a veteran staffer to basically give him senator lessons.”

Booker has huge potential to serve as a bridge-builder in Washington, as he has in New Jersey. But the price he’ll have to pay is to check his ego at the door, to let someone else charge into the burning building and save the lady in distress. That might be his toughest challenge yet.